Thursday, August 27, 2009

Over the last couple of years, the TCL world has moved on from
TCL8.3 to TCL8.4 --- this introduces a set of needed
changes to how Emacspeak servers such as Espeak and
ViaVoice-Outloud work.
I have finally decided to break backward compatibility with
TCL8.3 and move things forward to TCL8.4, now that all the Linux
distributions have settled on TCL8.4.

Also, sometime in 2005, I transitioned all of the server
Makefiles to use libtool --- at the time, it made compilation of
the servers somewhat easier. However, this has tended to make
things more complex over time, thanks to changes in libtool. I've
now dropped the libtool dependency in favor of using simpler
Makefiles --- thanks William Hubbs of Gentoo!

ViaVoice Outloud Server For Emacspeak

The Voxin package from Guilles continues to be the easiest
means of obtaining high-quality text-to-speech on Linux.
Installation of that package went smoothly on Hardy; however on
Jaunty, things did not go so well, see notes below for things to
watch out for on Jaunty or later.

The libstdc++ compat libraries ended up not getting installed
on Jaunty. Consequence, ViaVoice produces a warning asking you to
install the ViaVoice RTK, even though it's already installed. I
ended up rescueing the compat libs from my Hardy build. Perhaps
we should put up a simple tar.gz file that drops those libs into
/usr/lib?

Alsa is configured to use pulseaudio on Jaunty.
An unfortunate consequence is that when ViaVoice runs, it sounds
like a stereo channel played as mono, i.e. the speech slows down
and the voice sounds wrong. The fix is to create a .asoundrc
file in your home directory --- you can use the sample in
linux-outloud/ASOUNDRC as a starting point. To see if
pulseaudio is intervening in your setup, do
:aplay -v wav file
--- to see the set of alsa plugins that are participating in
audio output.

ESpeak And Emacspeak

The ESpeak server does not get affected by the above
problem. However, unless you install package alsa-oss
and invoke that server as
:aoss tcl espeak
the server will fail to start if some other application is using
the audio device.

Software Dectalk And Emacspeak

This still needs testing under newer Linux distributions ---
I've not used it in a long time and dont have the libs installed
any more.